So I was always under the impression that Xbox Live Silver, or free, memberships didn't allow you to play games online. My son is currently playing Halo Reach online in his room as we speak but we have not paid for a Gold membership for him. I'm slightly concerned because the language on Live gets pretty rough.

Looking around online there seem to be some reports of only certain games allowing free online play. I can't really pin it down though. Does anyone know if there is official support of online play with the free Live account? I can't find anything on the XBL official site but he is definitely online right now playing with his friends.

Did you try asking your son? I would be surprised if he didn't know considering he's taking advantage of it.

Regardless, Halo Reach (as well as most--if not all-Xbox Live games) require a Gold membership to play. However, some games do come with a free 48-hour trial (or something like that) and this weekend is, as mentioned, a free Gold weekend, which happens every now and then and is likely how he's playing online.

Did you try asking your son? I would be surprised if he didn't know considering he's taking advantage of it.

Regardless, Halo Reach (as well as most--if not all-Xbox Live games) require a Gold membership to play. However, some games do come with a free 48-hour trial (or something like that) and this weekend is, as mentioned, a free Gold weekend, which happens every now and then and is likely how he's playing online.

Yeah. He's 8. He doesn't know shit. I think it is the free weekend though. As far as parental controls go we are going to turn them on now probably. We don't care if he is on voice chat with his friends but he made friends with some random dude yesterday, who we quickly deleted. I wonder if Microsoft has considered that kids with no Live Gold access are getting it automatically like this. I 'm guessing it's an unintended consequence of just turning it on for everyone for the free weekend though. It's our responsibility to control the Xbox though so I'm not complaining about MS here. Just that we were ok with all Silver access capabilities so we didn't turn on any of the parental stuff but with auto gold he can go online so I guess we need to adjust it now.